wfn.org | Israeli, Palestinian peacemakers find themselves roommates in

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Note #6131 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

Louisville
19-July-2000
00268

Israeli, Palestinian peacemakers find themselves roommates in Louisville

"What if we talk politics and end up fighting?"

by Alexa Smith

LOUISVILLE, Ky. -- Sure, Gila Svirsky said, of course she could invite Nora
Kort to her West Jerusalem home; but, even before asking, she knew what Kort
would say: No thanks.
	"I would not accept. And, no, I would not invite you (to my home)," Kort
said, not unkindly, but matter-of-factly.
	Svirsky said she knows that those are the rules; she has run into them
before in her peace work -- even though both women have common goals for the
development of communities, and even though both live in Israeli-controlled
West Jerusalem.
	 One is a non-practicing Jew, the other a Christian Palestinian. Hence,
they may talk comfortably on one of Jerusalem's crowded streets, and they
may show up at the same conferences or protests.
	But they cannot yet be friends. There's political risk, for sure, and
there's also heartbreak. That's just the way it is.
	"There is risk in my community," said Kort, a Palestinian community
development expert who admits that her reticence isn't purely because of
social pressure. "I do not want to be outlawed in my own community." She has
her own hurts.
	 Acceptance in Svirsky's Jewish neighborhood isn't a piece of cake, either.
Although she may get away with more, socially, than a Palestinian peacemaker
might try, her neighbors, as they say, don't much care for the radical
stances she takes in favor of peace. Svirsky, along with her two
twenty-something daughters, belongs to the Women in Black, who stand on
Jerusalem streets as a protest of the continuing violence. And heads turn
when she unabashedly says that testosterone is the biggest block to peace
between Israelis and Palestinians.
	  As she puts it: "I have to keep repeating in my circles that I love
Israel . . . or I'm suspected of not being a true patriot. It is my love for
Israel (that allows) me to criticize Israel."
	Neither woman knew what to do recently when, by mistake, they found
themselves booked as roommates for four nights at the downtown Hyatt
Regency, as international guests of the Jubilee 2000 Gathering of
Presbyterian Women. "I was taken by surprise . . . and I wondered whether to
take this or not, thinking, ‘It is not going to be easy for me or for her,'"
Kort said. "I thought, it will be embarrassing for her; what if we talk
politics and end up fighting?'
	"But we have respect for each other. We look at each other as equals," Kort
tactfully told a group of about 40 women during an inter-faith workshop.
	Yet Kort told the Presbyterian News Service that she won't be telling too
many folks back home that she shared a room with an Israeli.
	This is all part of the delicate diplomacy that goes along with life in
Israel, or in Palestine, or in Israel/Palestine; a nation, or some say two
nations, whose names may be flip-flopped depending on the audience or the
speaker. As this story is being written, and the Presbyterian Women's
conference is wrapping up, some dicey diplomatic work is under way at Camp
David, where President Clinton is sequestered with Israeli Prime Minister
Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yassar Arafat.
	The sticking points, of course, are the same intractable issues as always.
	 At press time there were rumors that Israel was offering Palestinians
civil control of only parts of East Jerusalem, the historically Arab section
of the city that Palestinians want as sovereign territory and as the capital
of the state Arafat has promised to declare on Sept. 13, whether he has an
agreement in hand by then or not.
	That civil control, according to The Jerusalem Post, would include Arab
neighborhoods in and around East Jerusalem, and Muslim and Christian holy
sites in the Old City.
	 However, Palestinians have maintained that anything less than full
sovereignty is unacceptable.
	Israel captured East Jerusalem in the 1967 war, and annexed it in spite of
international protest. Palestinians are demanding that Israel pull out of
the territories seized in that war and allow the return of refugees who were
forcefully displaced by Zionists in 1947 and 1948. They also want Israel to
dismantle Jewish settlements in Gaza and the West Bank.
	The Israelis have maintained that Jerusalem -- undivided -- is the
undisputed capital of Israel. The New York Times said Wednesday morning that
Camp David negotiators are proposing to accept 100,000 Palestinian refugees
into Israel  -- only to reunite families -- and not to require Israel to
accept responsibility for their original expulsion.
	Rumors were circulating Wednesday that Arafat had told aides in Gaza that
he was considering packing his bags and leaving. Reuters News Service
reported that Barak, too, was preparing to walk out.
	If negotiating all this on paper sounds like a nightmare, try living it,
day in and day out.
	"I feel terrible," Svirsky said, noting that while she is in Louisville,
her colleagues in Israel are protesting without her. "I feel torn. We need
more people organizing in the streets in Israel, setting up demonstrations,
letter-writing campaigns.
	"Sure, there are others doing it, but one more person is useful," added
Svirsky, who became an activist in 1987 when the Intifada broke out, which,
as she says, enabled Israelis to see that their occupation of the West Bank
was not benign, but was dividing families and causing death. "The (Israeli)
women's movement (for peace) is one step ahead of the mixed-gender
movement," Svirsky said, meaning that it is willing to concede that
Jerusalem must be shared by Palestinians and Israelis, and that Israeli
settlers in Palestinian territories must leave, or else stay under
Palestinian sovereignty.
	 "There is no problem with sharing Jerusalem," Svirsky said, insisting that
Muslims, Christians and Jews may worship there, and that the practical
realities of city-living may be negotiated. "A few men have to get over a
fixation," she said. "You divide the municipalities up.  You say, ‘You do
the garbage collection.  I'll do the streets.'
	"It is not a big problem. Except hormones get in the way," she told her
listeners at the inter-faith plenary.
	Kort said she has given up on protests, redirecting her energy into
projects with more tangible results, such as outreach to battered women, and
efforts to help women find ways to sell handmade goods. "I stopped going
into the streets in demonstrations. I give up. Why? We are always the
losers. And I want to use my anger for something more constructive, and my
only comfort is doing projects. . . .
	"At least I see something there . . . the every-day politics keep
changing," Kort said.
	But some things do not change. And no matter how much time goes by, the
hurt stays.
	For Kort, there's her father's house. Her mother's piano sits where it
always did downstairs. The pomegranate tree still blossoms in the yard. But
-- even though her father left her the house key when he died -- the family
was ousted from the property before Kort was born, and cannot get it back.
It is now an Israeli cultural center; the 15th-century chapel in its
basement is now used for meetings of Holocaust survivors.
	"My cousin, when she saw the house, couldn't even go in," Kort said. "She
stood outside and cried. But I have to put my faith into practice. And
reconciliation is one thing (that is necessary). I have to learn about this.
	"It is not easy," she admitted, describing as "a monster" the anger and
pain that have infiltrated the society. "I have a lot of reconciliation work
to do in me. There is monster in me.
	"This is where (reconciliation) begins," she said, putting her hand to her
chest.
	Both women say fear is the biggest obstacle to peace.
	"People in the United States don't understand the fear," said Svirsky.
"They don't understand how much Israelis are afraid of Palestinians, afraid
of anyone who is not a Jew. It is an old paranoia, rooted in the context of
historical persecution."
	Svirsky said it was her own Zionism -- a belief in the national liberation
of the Jewish people -- that brought her to Israel from the United States 34
years ago.
	She describes her work for peace as moral and utilitarian: Both countries
will benefit economically when the violence ends, and ending the violence
itself is a moral good. "I am not," she said, "a person of faith, period;
but I am a Jewish daughter. . . . And this is right morally. It is what is
good for us morally."
	Palestinians, Kort pointed out, are afraid of Israeli expansionism and the
loss of yet more land. Too many, she said, remember the old Zionist rhetoric
calling for the state of Israel to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates,
displacing the people who live there.
	"It is overwhelming, what is going on my country," Kort told her listeners.
	But she put it more bluntly to the Presbyterian News Service, saying,
"Sanity is very difficult to keep."

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